It's probably because most games that go Free-to-play end up going from tolerable to terrible. Look at SWTOR for a good example of that. The game had issues, but it was tolerable. It went F2P and enjoyed a bit of a population bump, and now it's ridiculous. Everything, including the holiday fluff, hidden behind a paywall, and absolutely no seriousness at all left in the game with all the ridiculous cash grab customization stuff.

So from where I'm standing it's totally reasonable to be skeptical of a game transitioning into F2P territory until that game proves itself to handle F2P better than all the other current F2P games.

there is plenty of free to play / buy to play games that dont have massive required cash grabs... they have cash grabs for things you see and you're like hell yeah i want that, aion, tera, GW2, Neverwinter (inc)... SWTOR is a terrible example to use because they jumped onto the "freemium" model and dont get them confused.. freemium is trash "give me money for this content, give me money for that content, give me money for this quest pack and that quest pack" or pay a sub and you can have 70% of it anyway...

The problem with the internet is parallel to its greatest achievement: it has given the little man an outlet where he can be heard. Most of the time however, the little man is a little man because he is not worth hearing.
Want to chat with people who aren't idiots? Join our IRC.

I quit wow because they keep nerfing classes left and right. Played feral druid doing 110k dps all 463 gear in october then come back to wow in march im doing 41k wasted 30k gold in enchants and gems on a dead server to increase my dps by 4k. And that's when i had enough only time ill return if they leave pve alone instead nerfing on every patch

Other hobbies can be both fun and productive; the only thing you get out of WoW that could be anywhere half-productive is group leading skills (which, after you've attained, leaves nothing).

Or other hobbies could not interest me in the slightest.

Good thing I manage my time so that I have time to have fun and other time set aside to be productive!

I mourn the loss of a man of true vision and talent. You were my idol, Mr. Giger.
You gave faces to my dreams and nightmares and sparked my imagination throughout my entire life. You will be missed.Hans Rudolf Giger
2/5/1940 - 5/12/2014

The problem with the internet is parallel to its greatest achievement: it has given the little man an outlet where he can be heard. Most of the time however, the little man is a little man because he is not worth hearing.
Want to chat with people who aren't idiots? Join our IRC.

I mourn the loss of a man of true vision and talent. You were my idol, Mr. Giger.
You gave faces to my dreams and nightmares and sparked my imagination throughout my entire life. You will be missed.Hans Rudolf Giger
2/5/1940 - 5/12/2014

We all have certain aspects of the game that we do not like, for some of us it is dailies for others of us it is raiding or dungeons or pvp or pet battles. The whole point of them having so many different things to do is to try to cater to everyone's tastes. Yes sometimes the method you enjoy might not be quite as efficient as another method, but then you have an option at least. If you have said method so much then don't do it, but if you want to be as efficient as possible then you do. You are not forced into doing anything in particular with you in game time. The people that say we are forced to do dailies, as an example, are the people who want the end goal without any of effort of getting there. These people do not realise that the MMO genre is all about the getting there part, as soon as you reach one goal there is another one dangled in front of you.

I don't play, I just bot these days.
I don't think for me, it's the game that's bad, I'm just not that into it anymore.

Vanilla-lovers like to talk about the old days like it was better, but that's because everything was new, and had to be explored. But it isn't new anymore, you've seen everything. The new stuff are just the same shit in different colors.

I started playing at release in 2004, but I "quit" just before Cata launch. I've kept my sub, and played maybe 4 hours a month since, but i wouldn't call myself a wow-player anymore.

no body... i dont think you can quite make that assumption for every person who has ever played WoW.. i quite miss seperate 10 and 25 man lockouts.... i miss running GDKPs doing content i enjoyed doing and getting paid todo it... there was nothing wrong with seperate lockouts... it was a choice not an obligation, i mean unless you wanted better gear then 25 man was the only option, but a lot more 25 man guilds exsisted back in the day too

I love GDKPs too. It was the best loot distribution system for PUGs ever devised. And ToC and ICC with GDPK was amazing. But we're not talking about shared lockouts here. We're talking about different raids for 10m and 25m. E.g. 10m guilds can't do TK or SSC, or Firelands is only 25m and Hour of Twilight is only 10m.

---------- Post added 2013-04-25 at 07:26 AM ----------

Originally Posted by Henako

Countless travesties and injustices go unchecked in the world, and this man chooses to hate free shit.

I've stopped my subscription this month for 2nd time this expansion. I've been a player since vanilla wow and have endured the changes some good some bad but the main reason for stopping is the people....the people who made the game fun for me and have stopped playing. As I've gotten older I realize that now...Game was empty and boring without them. Pandaria itself I dunno not my cup of tea, some areas remind me of being inside a nice Chinese restaurant. And the voices of the pandas...only expansion that made me turn off my sound...."Slooow down!" The grinding and gating - alot of complaints about that but hell its always been in the game in one form or another so that never phased me.

I love GDKPs too. It was the best loot distribution system for PUGs ever devised. And ToC and ICC with GDPK was amazing. But we're not talking about shared lockouts here. We're talking about different raids for 10m and 25m. E.g. 10m guilds can't do TK or SSC, or Firelands is only 25m and Hour of Twilight is only 10m.

it depends.. like who can argue that 40 man content wasnt badass and at the time was only suited to a raid with 40 people, scaling encounters gets you so far but look at the problem we have now... some enbounters overly easy on 10 man can be rediculous on 25 man or vice versa.. so it's a double edged blade really, but at the end of the day blizz will never make 100% of the playerbase happy and clearly they're not hurting for revenue off the game so they will keep making changes as they see fit and if we dont like it.. it's our choice to play or not

I honestly dont know what would make me play WoW again.
I really used to love almost every aspect of the game (except PvP), but when MoP came it suddenly felt dull and no fun anymore. I think it is a combination of the fact that I played it since vanilla beta (more than eight years) and that I had something "against" Mists of Pandaria.

I would play it again if I thought it would feel fun again to play, but I doubt it will. Maybe if next expansion looks intresting I will resub, level past the horrible Panda land and test the new expansion, but I honestly dont know.. I think it is alot up to if I have anything else to play when that time comes, and hopefully Wildstar is just half as good as I think and I will not turn back to WoW...

The game has become dull to me since a long time ago. Not even the most complex raidboss encounters would be able to interest me much.

It would need to be made into a whole different game with "next-gen" MMORPG gameplay mechanics to interest me again. Until then not even if the subscription was for free the game would be able to interest me much. I only sporadically browse these forums now and again for updates on the lore...

Misbehave, Misbehave, Misbehave. Misbehave because you are not a puppet or a robot, but a human being that can experience the world from different perspectives. "But misbehaving is the first sin! When we are children we are told so! Even in the Bible we got cast out of Eden because Eve misbehaved!"
Cogs, robots and machines aren't allowed to misbehave. Are you trying to become a machine then?

there is plenty of free to play / buy to play games that dont have massive required cash grabs... they have cash grabs for things you see and you're like hell yeah i want that, aion, tera, GW2, Neverwinter (inc)... SWTOR is a terrible example to use because they jumped onto the "freemium" model and dont get them confused.. freemium is trash "give me money for this content, give me money for that content, give me money for this quest pack and that quest pack" or pay a sub and you can have 70% of it anyway...

Whatever, but subscriptions are ALWAYS better than freemium, free to play or ANY other form of play.

A subscription in an MMO means the player belongs to a club. It is his/her ticket to belong to that exclusive club.

Clubs with free memberships are never long lasting these days, because the members actually don't feel obliged or engaged.

They have no commitment.

These days the battle for subscriptions has run its course and so WOW is the only one - huge social wise - with any long term commitment advantage.

You'll see.

Independant of how any person feels towards WOW in "this" point in his life ... the subscription as such is a very strong binder which is lacking in free to play games.

while at the same time you say At no point in WoW's history has it been more grindy than it was in classic WoW. Why would say that you want it to return to those "core Warcraft values" which included an incredible grind at level cap (by the time you even reached it after grinding out many levels on just mindlessly killing mobs) rather than the game as it is? There is little about World of Warcraft that is the same as classic. Aside from raiding (which was present at end-game) and PvP, there is:

You don't make sense. The game as it existed in classic is nothing like it is today. Even BC was a leap ahead but still far behind than today. I fail to see how that isn't an overhaul of an "8 year old game system"

This pretty much nails it. The game today offers just about eveything someone could want in WoW. the people that left are simply tired of playing it, have other games to play or have moved on in life and can't include a game that takes up this much time into their life. While this may not be my favorite expansion, it definitely doesn't offer the least amount of game play and things to do. On the contrary it's quite overwhelming to come back to pandaland and have more than i can possibly do awaiting for me.

I'm a tough cookie to crumble, I want less spells to have to keybind (screen looks so meh : /), more content, updated graphics, better lore, better questing, updated fighting system... I just really don't appreciate WoW in it's current state. Not that I'm hating on it or talking shit, obviously the game is doing something right to be this popular. I just went past it. Similar to how I outgrew pokemon. Fun fact, I actually really still want to play Pokemon. And WoW. But both are incredibly boring to me now. Even when I try, just can't play it. So, honestly, f2p, and a lot of other stuff is what it takes to get me back.

Originally Posted by checking facts

it's pretty hard to find a good girl in the sea of whores that is my country, brazil.

Burning Legion expansion
then let me get all my rep + other shit from an alternate route (running dungeons) instead of daily quests
if you think dailies are fun, thats fine, but there's a huge portion of the population that actually likes playing the game (dungeons, battlegrounds, etc) rather than repetitive quests

Heroics are repetitive. And raids are also getting more repetitive because of LFR. Repetition is what you get when you make everything piss easy and convenient or you will have players who got nothing left to do.

I'm not coming back. I have played enough WoW and I didn't like more than half of the changes they made since WotLK. If I want "quick play" I can just play an FPS or something. I never played MMO's for that reason and it ruined it for me.
Bored and unhappy with the game in short. I came back two times for a short period of time and now I know for sure I don't want to play anymore. All WoW is now is just a gear treadmill.

Whatever, but subscriptions are ALWAYS better than freemium, free to play or ANY other form of play.

A subscription in an MMO means the player belongs to a club. It is his/her ticket to belong to that exclusive club.

Clubs with free memberships are never long lasting these days, because the members actually don't feel obliged or engaged.

They have no commitment.

These days the battle for subscriptions has run its course and so WOW is the only one - huge social wise - with any long term commitment advantage.

You'll see.

Independant of how any person feels towards WOW in "this" point in his life ... the subscription as such is a very strong binder which is lacking in free to play games.

i dont know if you're trying to be ignorant... Aion has been free to play for over a year now and is going stronger then ever... yeah.. you have a ticket to an exclusive club that any asshole with a method to pay a subscription can also be a part of... also, it's not the subscription models that keep players, it's the quality of the game and it's accessibility, both of which WoW has done pretty well with especially as of late, so subscription or free wouldnt matter as long as they didnt prolong content moreso then the current schedule they seem to release it at or the quality of the work they do.. players would still continue to play free or not...

i bought the 1 year sub for diablo 3... i didnt play for like 8 months of the subscription, i was still paying for my super exclusive ticket... but had no interest in the game, a subscription doesnt invoke loyality, i never let my WoW sub lapse.. because i might wanna play it, so i'm just paying on the off chance i want to play it.. not that i actively do, i dont have any loyalty or need to play the game because i'm playing for it...

Heroics are repetitive. And raids are also getting more repetitive because of LFR. Repetition is what you get when you make everything piss easy and convenient or you will have players who got nothing left to do.

I'm not coming back. I have played enough WoW and I didn't like more than half of the changes they made since WotLK. If I want "quick play" I can just play an FPS or something. I never played MMO's for that reason and it ruined it for me.
Bored and unhappy with the game in short. I came back two times for a short period of time and now I know for sure I don't want to play anymore. All WoW is now is just a gear treadmill.

Raids are more about having timers and cooldowns all over the screen 90% of the time your looking at what needs to be refreshed and when to move instead of experiencing the content. 1 minute big dots 30 second regular dots and so on with warlock now its like refresh every 8 seconds or dps drops to the ground